Vade mecum
Valeriano Trubbiani.
De Rerum fabula 
sculptures, settings, drawings 1965-2007
Mole Vanvitelliana - Museo Tattile Statale Omero, Ancona 
20 October - 17 March

Valeriano Trubbiani.
The complete Trubbiani in 20 «scenes»
The unusual title «De rerum fabula» is justified as, in summarising the major goals of Trubbiani's imaginative dynamic over half a century of work, the Ancona retrospective highlights an aspect that has emerged with particular clarity in recent decades: the fantastical evocative fabulation which envelops his unique associative narrative dimension and which has distinguished the sculpture from the decades of his full artistic maturity. Which, in his very personal imaginative journey, can be set broadly speaking, within a current of visionary «neo-expressionist» freedom dominant where that which counts most is the ability to bear witness to the times, in the artistic expression of the second half of the twentieth century, not only in Europe. A fabulous narrative dimension by means of assembled sculpted icons, of intense high-quality metalwork, where diverse components come together: an ancestral metallurgical culture; a wealth of agrarian anthropology; a wealth of Classical memories (Helvia Ricina, and the Ancona of the Emperor Trajan); the influence of Leopardi, both his evocative lyrical subtlety, and his criticism of his times and of human destiny; a fascination with the remote, with voyages, adventures in the Orient (Ciriaco de’ Pizzecolli). This large retrospective is being held in Ancona, the city in which the sculptor chose to live and work in 1968. In 1976 he moved to the hill-town of Candia which overlooks Ancona. Unlike many contemporary great artists from the Marches who moved away, to Rome in particular, Trubbiani preferred a solitary, critical destiny characterised by the antagonistic forces of his activity and reflectiveness. Filling various large galleries of the Mole Vanvitelliana (built 1733-38 on a small island in the harbour by the great Neapolitan architect Luigi Vanvitelli, pentagonal ex leper colony and hospital-fortress), this retrospective, designed by Massimo Di Matteo, architect,  and Mauro Tarsetti, the imaginative journey has the unusual form of a "secular play" in 20 “scenes” entitled "De rerum fabula". These theatrical sets are in chronological order with a "Prologue" and an "Epilogue", and with excerpts taken from Trubbiani's "poetics" written over the same period as that covered in the 20 «scenes».
􏰀Enrico Crispolti

«De rerum fabula» per scripta Valeriani
The "fable of things" is presented in a in revelatory sense, which clarifies and complements that of the sculptural and graphic works, through interaction with Valeriano Trubbiani's written compositions, which parallel the “visible” scene, backstage in the most private part of the artist's life. Trubbiani's pages should not be construed as an impromptu or makeshift corollary, or as sketchbooks or notes which preceding the final form of the work, but as works in themselves, of research and investigation, an unexpected and liberating junction where he break free from a troubled relationship with the material, and free his vision in a more amplified resonance. In his text Alcuni pensieri di fine estate (some late-summer thoughts), Trubbiani confesses that the word has always been a "friend" and that he has always managed to draw «consolation and soothing contentment» from writing and admits his need to bring into peaceful co-existence «the providential friendship of the word» and the presence of «other ways of working which are more prickly and cruel, though unsuppressable»
􏰀Simone Dubrovic (extract from the catalogue text)

A dialogue with Valeriano Trubbiani

You have often stated that a work of art must wound and in your sculpture have always shown situations of conflict and aggression such as cruisers, planes, warriors, helmets, swords, shields, guns, hooks, armour.
In these dangerous situations there is a link with my youth when, beyond the river Potenza, I heard German tanks rolling and creaking forwards to destroy and wreak havoc. It's a very vivid memory that has always tortured me. The idea of ​​the Nazis, extermination camps, terrible, terrifying, has always caused me infinite dismay.

In your opinion, what is an artist today?
Voracious, all-encompassing, ravenous and insatiable. That is how I would define the contemporary artist.

In the iconography of your work you make continual references to the art of the past, from the Archaic to the Middle Ages or the Renaissance ... 
My work had benefitted from my obsession with re-connecting to history, "the weight of history," as Crispolti would say. To the Medieval, Roman, Greek, Oriental, Assyrian-Babylonian and Mycenaen periods. At times I even invent for myself, although I never been a priest nor studied Latin, I invent a macaronic 'latinorum', which i find extremely expressive, charming.

Contradiction: it is a problem for an artist?
I am very severe with myself, a castigator of myself, and sometimes use a flagellum to punish myself,  metaphorically of course. 

Many sculptors, yourself included, were and are passionate about motorbikes: Agenore Fabbri, Pino Pascali, Gianni Piacentino, Giuseppe Ducrot, Paolo Canevari. Why this love?
There was a time that I owned four. Just crazy. Today my wrists tremble just thonking about the risks I ran ... It was a moment of madness, maybe I had to release my inner energy, but mostly I was excited by the noise, the engines and that way of earthing my energy, making stones fly with the scrambling tyres, to wreak violence on matter, rage against it, but in a beneficial way. And then the dressing up as gladiators, those special scrambling outfits ...

How important are failures for an artist?
They mean improving, learning to avoid pitfalls. There's a trap, your skirt round it, you take another and avoid the dangers. It is not a timorous or cowardly attitude, it stops you wasting time.
􏰀 By Marco Tonelli
(Excerpt from the interview in the catalogue)

Valerian Trubbiani. the task of sculpture
"The task of the sculpture is to poke around in the wounds of poetry and life. Indeed it must cause them. A sculpture must always be a danger, otherwise it is only the transience of a sweetened Arcadian ornamentation. Poetry and the everyday, recording events and lyrical penetration alternate in the cruelty of creation. Like the alternations in life, from silence torn by the cry, listening for the third intruder: echo. And staring with the third eye of the visionary. And so, between deep noises and profound silence, with eyes fixed, the ball of the world continues rolling indefinitely and, every so often, I too give it a good kicking: affectionately". 
(From La scultura, 1984)

With eyes and hands
The Museo Tattile Statale Omero of Ancona was founded in 1993 to offer visually-handiccaped people the opportunity to learn about art and enjoy beauty through tactile exploration. But it soon burst the banks of its educational and, let us say, social function, to spread over the open fields of pure aesthetic enjoyment.
Today at the Museo Omero the vast majority of visitors are sighted and they share an exciting discovery with the visually handicapped: that a tactile approach to works of sculpture can add excitement to the emotion of seeing and enrich an experience which is already full of nuances, enabling them to rediscover the delight of a full and complete relationship with the nature of things, that only a lifeless, flesh-stripping education has reduced to ethereal incorporeal images. Children and lovers know how to love with their eyes and hands. Art can be loved like this: looking and caressing blends the pleasure of sensation, both tactile and visual, with the thrill of discovery in a more affectionate and engaging relationship with the object. "De Rerum Fabula" is a tactile exhibition and offers all our visitors an opportunity to learn about the work of a great living artist in two separate ways: either a traditional, purely visual, visit for people who only want to look or the new experience of a more physical and emotional contact. This exhibition also casts a stone at a taboo which is as durable as all clichés, that a serious museum always forbids touching, as if the objects acquire a kind of sacredness from being placed in a museum. The Museo Omero and the Trubbiani exhibition want to shout that the protection of cultural artefacts forbids their being touched only in cases where this would lead to a real risk of deterioration; in all other cases (and there are many) let touch enable the blind to see and the sighted to enjoy an experience that will be hard to forget.
 􏰀 Aldo Grassini
President State Tactile Museum Omero

The 'great torments of the "gunslinger" Trubbiani'. 
Opening notes on ​​the Trubbiani-Marchiori correspondence.
Towards the end of 1962, two key figures entered the life of the sculptor whose career had just begun:  the young Enrico Crispolti, just four years older than him, and Giuseppe Marchiori, a generation older than both, who would become for both a reassuring point of reference, as both example and willing source of informed but never pedantic opinion. Proof of this can be found in the prolific correspondence which travelled up and down the Adriatic coast from Venice and Lendinara to Ancona, between the "pilgrim of European sculpture" and the artist with "a taste for torture and Medieval punishments", from 1963, but especially from 1965, until the death of the Venetian critic in 1982. An intense and deeply felt exchange. Trubbiani sent frequent letters to Venice in his regular, crisp, un-nuanced handwriting; slightly right-leaning, his narrow italics fill the pages to the edges. He confides his doubts and bitterness to Marchiori, keeps him up to date with a steady stream of photographs of his works. His constant desire is to shorten distances, use every possible opportunity for frank and direct exchange or even just listen to Marchiori, in whom he recognises a tireless teacher of doctrine and a keen observer of the times. In fact, Marchiori's diary (September 9, 1966) notes that "Trubbiani observes me and listens to me. He is a discreet companion: he even listens to my rapt silence".
􏰀 Luca Pietro Nicoletti (extract from the text of the catalogue)

On setting up De Rerum Fabula
The design project reflects the structure of the exhibition, which was conceived as a secular portrayal of a journey through half a century of Trubbiani's works. In creating twenty chronologically-ordered scenes, the project tends to enhance their imaginative and dreamlike content through placing them as if in stage sets made of clearly fictitious apparatus and materials. The exhibition does not interpret the settings in merely perspective terms but as a sequence of complex loci to explore through a participative and liberating experience: the scenes are defined by fleeting, evocative boundaries, each configured on the basis of the particular themes of the contents, while they also respect the spaces in Vanvitelli's architecture. But the layout is also a new, multi-sensory journey: in addition to tactile and visual exploration, the visitor is drawn in by sounds, smells and the textures of the different floorings which at times create friction, changes of slope or a sense of slipping. The decision to extend the exhibition into the large loft overlooking the main gallery, allowed us to create interferences between different scenes and unexpected views of the installations. Some were created for the occasion, as in the cycles of individual sculptures (such as, for example, "Macchine belliche", 1965-68; "Aruspici", 1968-1974; "Ti amo pio bove", 1975-1978; "Putti giochi di mare, giochi di cielo", 1980-1982; "Mare, corazzate", 1982-2001; "Città", 1983-1987 and 1990-2004; "Elmi, caschi, scafandri, borgognotte", 1992-1998). Others are existing environmental installations which have been reinterpreted for the new spatial correlation offered by the Mole Vanvitelliana (some being memorable historic achievements, in particular "Stato d'assedio", 1971-72; "Le morte stagioni", 1973; " Ractus, ractus. Stato d'assedio", 1976-1979; "Il silenzio del giorno", 1979; "Turrita urbis pugnandi", 1981 to 1984; "Colosseo", 1994 -1997). Other scenes present cycles of drawings (such as "Ciriaco de' Pizzecolli", 1990-1991, and "Ancona", 1987-2005), and even the use of pyrographs (such as the cycle dedicated to Leopardi, 1993-1997).
 􏰀 Massimo Di Matteo and Mauro Tarsetti

De Rerum Fabula. sculptures, installations, drawings 1965 - 2007
20th October 2012 - March 2013
Address
Mole Vanvitelliana, Banchina G. da Chio, 28 - Ancona
Inauguration
20 October 2012 at 17.30 in the Sale Podesti, Mole Vanvitelliana 
Presentation of the Catalogue, published by Silvana Editoriale
28 November 2012
Promoters
Museo Tattile Statale Omero and the Municipality of Ancona, Department of Culture
Patrons
Mibac - Ministry of Culture, Marches Region
Contributions from
Banca delle Marche, Ancona Chamber of Commerce, Unipol Assicurazioni
In collaboration with
The "Per il Museo Tattile Statale Omero" Onlus Association 
Organising Committee
Museo Tattile Statale Omero (Aldo Grassini, president, Daniela Bottegoni, Domenico Cardamone), Municipality of Ancona - Department of Culture (Andrea Nobili, director) the Civic Art Gallery (Costanza Costanzi, director)
Scientific Committee
Aldo Grassini, Enrico Crispolti, Massimo Di Matteo, Simone Dubrovic, Mauro Tarsetti, Massimiliano Trubbiani
Coordination
Aldo Grassini
Curator of the exhibition and catalogue
Enrico Crispolti, in collaboration with Simone Dubrovic
Exhibition design
Massimo Di Matteo, Mauro Tarsetti
Works loaned by
The "F. Podesti" Civic Art Gallery of Ancona, the Municipality of Falconara Marittima
Lighting
Effetto Luce
Communication and Press Office
Stilema s.r.l., Turin
Exhibition office
Annalisa Trasatti, Maria Giulia Cester
Visual aids
Daniela Bottegoni
Educational services and guided tours
Andrea Socrati, Manuela Alessandrini, Monica Bernacchia, Cristiana Carlini, Maria Giulia Cester, Francesca Graziani, Annalisa Trasatti, Massimiliano Trubbiani (Museo Tattile Statale Omero), Alessandra Giorgini, Lucia Gorgoglione, Sara Pandolfi, Giulia Serritelli (National Civilian Voluntary Service); Blanca Delaquintana (European Voluntary Service)
Catalogue
by Enrico Crispolti, in collaboration with Simone Dubrovic, published by Silvana Editoriale, containing: critical essays by Enrico Crispolti, Simone Dubrovic, Marco Tonelli and Luca Pietro Nicoletti; details of the exhibition design by Massimo Di Matteo and Mauro Tarsetti; texts of Valeriano Trubbiani's "poetics" (downloadable from: www.museoomero.it)
Documentation
Crispolti Archive, Rome; Trubbiani Archive, Ancona
Audio dialogues
Edizioni Quarto Turno with Luca Violini, Daniela Debolini, Aldo Russo (downloadable from: www.museoomero.it)
Graphics accompanying the exhibition
Chiara Ludolini
Info
Museo Tattile Statale Omero, Banchina G. da Chio, 28  Ancona, tel 071 2811935, 0712225031 during exhibition opening times, fax 071 2818358, email: info@museoomero.it; site: www.museoomero.it; Audio Website 800 20 22 20.